Well after a year of never even touching a compass, I finally had to pick one up yesterday to find my way through the vegetation once again. And yet, after such a long period of hibernation, I still can navigate! I am thoroughly amazed. The first 3 checkpoints were quite much a giveaway, seeing that I roughly knew where I could find them but to find a checkpoint, no matter how easy is still a great feeling. The next one was almost a disaster, although I didn't tell anyone, because I followed someone's rough advice rather than sticking to my initial plan and almost completely missed it. Thankfully I had a feeling I had to revert to my original direction halfway through and managed to drift back into the correct path. Of course, I had help from wanderers to find the checkpoint. I normally don't have the checkpoint luck where we are already in the vicinity of it and just need to find it.
The last one was something like the crowning glory. Finding the last checkpoint was what made me impress myself the most. It was the one I thought that I wouldn't be able to find because it was a 700m bash straight through the vegetation and yet, when I gave the green light to comb the surrounding area, the checkpoint was less than 60m from where I stopped! Pretty good for someone who had to simply act confident and pray from the 3rd checkpoint onwards. And so we were the first group to complete, making it my most successful navigation ever! Felt this sense of happiness and satisfaction when we found our last checkpoint. Even more so because we found all the checkpoints in 3hrs which is fast!
All that brings me to the point whether it is better to have many people who can topo or to just have 1 or 2 guys to topo the entire way because when you have a lot of cooks, when you meet a situation with several routes to take, you tend to spend a lot of time deciding on what to do. In our situation now, however, we have to make it seem like we know what we're doing and quickly decide on a course of action which firstly saves time and secondly doesn't let the morale drop so quickly because the others may not even know that we have been disorientated. The downside is that all the responsibility falls on you so if you honestly don't know what to do, there isn't much help on offer.
So do too many cooks really spoil the broth?
The last one was something like the crowning glory. Finding the last checkpoint was what made me impress myself the most. It was the one I thought that I wouldn't be able to find because it was a 700m bash straight through the vegetation and yet, when I gave the green light to comb the surrounding area, the checkpoint was less than 60m from where I stopped! Pretty good for someone who had to simply act confident and pray from the 3rd checkpoint onwards. And so we were the first group to complete, making it my most successful navigation ever! Felt this sense of happiness and satisfaction when we found our last checkpoint. Even more so because we found all the checkpoints in 3hrs which is fast!
All that brings me to the point whether it is better to have many people who can topo or to just have 1 or 2 guys to topo the entire way because when you have a lot of cooks, when you meet a situation with several routes to take, you tend to spend a lot of time deciding on what to do. In our situation now, however, we have to make it seem like we know what we're doing and quickly decide on a course of action which firstly saves time and secondly doesn't let the morale drop so quickly because the others may not even know that we have been disorientated. The downside is that all the responsibility falls on you so if you honestly don't know what to do, there isn't much help on offer.
So do too many cooks really spoil the broth?